In what we hope will be the final installment in our tracking of Pat O'Brien's publicist-orchestrated, constantly-televised march from coked-up, horny-voicemailing boozehound to temporarily dry, Dr.Phil-approved, redeemed tabloid-TV host, a little gossipy squirrel told us that O'Brien will open his triumphant return to The Insider tonight with the words, "I'm Pat O'Brien and I'm an alcoholic." Once viewers have been properly prepared for having their living rooms converted into O'Brien's one-man AA meeting, O'Brien will then complete the transformation by reciting the Serenity Prayer. We're sure it will all be incredibly heart-warming, America will forgive him for getting caught wanting to party with hookers and blow, and O'Brien will finally return to the important work of pretending to enjoy himself while accompanying Gwyneth Paltrow on a trip to have her poodle groomed in Beverly Hills.

After hiking up our gossip-pants and wading through the flood of your responses, we realized that we should never challenge your dedication to The Game, even after last week's sad showing. Splash on a little more One Comes Around Blind Vice before proceeding to your guesses:

From time to time, we willfully ignore a story until we receive so many e-mails about it that it will no longer be denied. So now at the risk of appearing blog-Paleolithic by bringing you this quote (its been bouncing around for a couple of days now on the wire), we give you "Paris Hilton Pretends Not To Know What A Blog Is" [cue flourish of horns]:

Wherein we invite our readers to don their pith helmets and dust off the blind-item bone-fragments unearthed by humpy E! gossip-archaeologist Ted Casablanca. This week, an unpleasant actress suffers karmic payback in the form of her husband's whoremongering. Knead the dough of One Comes Around Blind Vice:

An item in today's Page Six (which has finally been rescued from registration jail, for now) should set off a fresh tremor of panic at Sony, where executives watch helplessly as the star of their biggest franchise—now more Flabby-Godzilla than Spider-Man—continues to terrorize casino patrons with his unexpected girth:

After breaking the news that Dr. Phil would have sit-down with a recently rehabbed Pat O'Brien, we felt somewhat obligated to actually watch the show. And? Even though Dr. Phil roughed up O'Brien for a while, there were no tears, no burly man-hugs, no Dr. Phil putting on steel-toed boots and kicking in O'Brien's grill until he promised he'd never take another drink. The show did have its moments, though, which are lovingly transcribed at Dr. Phil's website:

Fresh off their hot, African safari of sexual sex-making that inspired locals to fear a lion-mauling took place in their bungalow, new Hollywood golden couple (sorry, Cruise-Holmes!) Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie embarked on an erotic thrill-ride through Morocco, where Pitt is starting to shoot Babel. Rush and Molloy say People will say:

· Arianna Huffington swears up and down that the celebrities appearing on The Huffington Post are not going to use ghost writers. Come on, like Warren Beatty ever learned to read and write? Nice try, wily Arianna! Additionally, please note that "assistants" and "ghost writers" are entirely different things. [via LA Observed]
· Bob Saget is desperate for you to know that he is very, very filthy and edgy.
· Yet another reason to love the British tabloids: Colin Farrell tries to give the gift of penis to his 70-year-old co-star, but his advances are rebuffed.
· Back tits: the newest sensation sweeping the OC.
· Overpay for a "dream date" with Carmen Electra (does she magically reverse-age seven years if you win?), help cure prostate cancer.
· The Onion says it for us all.

God bless the publicity-whoring geniuses at GoldenPalace.com, who are collecting curiosities (a grilled cheese Virgin Mary, a Lincoln french fry, and a woman with low self-esteem) at a rate that would make an Elephant-Man-bones-era Michael Jackson obsessively bleach himself to rid his face of any envy-green. They've now added Britney Spears' "alleged" pregnancy test to their promotional menagerie for a mere five grand. In the event of her inevitable divorce from background-househusbanding partner Kevin Federline, we think the casino's got favorable odds to buy his half of the baby for less than $20K.

The last time we discussed Russell Crowe, the actor had revealed that he was part of a kidnapping plot to "culturally destabilize" America. Not content to tussle with Al Qaeda, the actor is now ready to destabilize the jawbones of some a local playwright, whose Crowe-baiting work has the actor's 30 Odd Foot of Panties in a Bunch:

We expected that the breakneck pace and nonstop, paparazzi-friendly osculation of the Tom Cruise/Katie Holmes Unconvincing Handsy Lovers World Tour might take its toll on a new couple, but we never expected that the unyielding spotlight would drive Cruise crazy and cause him to attempt to gnaw off his new publicity partner's face. Yes, these pics (supposedly snapped during a recent shopping trip in Hollywood) are disturbing, but so are many things about the relationship. Always remember: behind every publicist-orchestrated making-out photo op lies a pair of painfully chapped lips.

Not surpisingly, Brad Pitt and Angelina's Sexy African Beach Romp of Sexual Sex was not comprised entirely of chaste sand-castle construction and the babysitting of Cambodian adoptees. There was fucking involved. Oh, was there fucking! The kind of fucking that has guards scrambling for their machetes, ready to dispatch whatever animal was loudly mauling a guest at their resort. Star magazine gets the goods:

Not content with merely liveblogging the disaster that was Rosie O'Donnell's foray into "serious" acting, Riding the Bus With My Sister, the guys at TVGasm have assembled a montage of...how can we put his delicately...Rosie's most special moments from the movie. While we're sure that O'Donnell entered into the project with only the best of intentions (and perhaps for the opportunity to abscond with her truly stunning wardrobe), the on-screen result should have advocates for the differently-abled driving a short bus full of explosives through the gates of CBS Television City any day now. Les Moonves will be finding the remains of smoldering, mismatched sneakers around the lot for weeks, wondering if his network's cheap ratings stunt was worth all the pain it caused.

Just in case you're the type of flat-earther that still believes in (or still in any way cares about) the viablity of Jessica Simpson and Nick Lachey's marriage, the Las Vegas Review Journal's Norm Clarke attempts to stick the proverbial fork in MTV's favorite couple:

Rush & Molloy report that the Tom Cruise/Katie Holmes Unconvincing Handsy Lovers Tour of 2005 made a stop in Vegas, the Mecca of all sham relationships, where they did what every set of crazy-in-love partners with big summer movies rolling out in a few weeks do to legitimize their union—make out furiously and publicly at a show. Luckily, that's as far as it went, as Cruise wasn't able to follow through on his original Vegas plan: taking Holmes' maidenhead at the top of the Luxor, high above an assembled throng of publicist-approved wire service photographers.

With Andy Dick allegedly getting a time-out for Coachella, the festival was going to need another larger-than-life personality to keep things around the Indio concert grounds at an acceptable level of "going fucking crazy." Luckily, one fucking-crazy-making man was up to the challenge, even if he was sober after a well-publicized drying-out stint. Says a reader, "Pat O'Brien was at Coachella, seemingly a day out of rehab. He came over and talked to me and my friends about how 'fucking pissed' he was that he missed the Stereophonics. He even posed for a pic with me."

See? Anyone can make out for the benefit of photographers; it doesn't necessarily mean they're having sexual relations.

The above pic (click it for a bigger version), supposedly straight from the set of Paris Hilton's "too hot for TV" Carl's Jr commercial, is spreading around the internets courtesy of a do-gooder whom we're sure has absolutely no vested interest in promoting the fast-food chain or the press-whoring celebutante's attempts at burger-fellating semi-outrageousness. Some good might actually have come out of this, however. If you imagine that the angry fetus who threatens to rip out his mom's uterus in an earlier Carl's commercial is actually inside Paris, that ad campaign finally starts to make some sense.

Just in case you missed the NYT's coverage of the New Gay Mafia (the comedy cartel that currently has the studios' collective testes in a vise and who playfully gives them a tickle whenever they've got a new movie idea), Vince Vaughn is finally a bonafide, eight-figure stah:

If you think we've been relentlessly torturing you as we work out our personal issues with the Tom Cruise-Katie Holmes situation, be glad you didn't run into us at a party this weekend. Watching a grown man collapse in a heap and cry after trying to explain all of the rational, publicity-driven motives behind the unholy pairing to drunk, uninterested friends is sad enough; when the friends decide the only way to silence you is to pelt your crumpled form with Solo cups half-full with cheap bear and cigarette butts, well, you learn to come to peace with things a little more quickly. Therapy takes many forms, and we're getting there. Slowly.